Speculating about spatial distributions enabled by biological hardware can be incredibly fun. It also comes with its spin on the utility aspect of computation, thought in analogy with environmental services provided by e.g. urban greenery. Trees are tools for temperature regulation, UV protection, or water and carbon capture. They help to mitigate heat waves or excessive rainfall. If the tree additionally acquires the meaning of a node in an information distribution network, a city park can become an ideal site for massive public data storage or transmission operations - it has simply more “compute” than your domestic flora. Such a speculative scenario discards the land use trade-off when it comes to data centers: instead of replacing forests with warehouses with silicon-based machines, perhaps a forest is the largest data center of all.

The difference between cloud computing and biocomputing is that you no longer have to strategise what you store remotely and what remains on your device: you can have all the information stored locally, in infinite copies, with the ability to be processed and acted upon right in the storage medium.

Think about it: Human DNA is an archival image of the history of terrestrial evolution, so if it is possible to store hundreds of millions of years of evolution in a blob of living matter, a few decades of internet evolution should not be a big deal either. Researchers and startups working on DNA data storage love to illustrate the potential of DNA by an analogy with the trunk of a car - in his address to the World Economic Forum, Nick Goldman from the European Bioinformatics Institute claims that all the world’s digital information stored in DNA format could easily fit into the back of one SUV (other experts prefer vans or hatchbacks).^[1]

Extrapolating the consequences of these properties of DNA storage to the domestic or urban environment, the possibility to ad hoc expand or move your data storage capacities should become as easy as adding a slice of cheese to your sandwich. This means also increased storage mobility and its seamless integration into organic bodies - e.g. carrying your movie database at the tip of your index finger, with the download and upload interface taking the shape of microscopic extraction needles in a little cleavage at the corner of a dining table.

Furthermore, DNA’s shelf life dramatically surpasses all hitherto data storage media, from magnetic tapes to SSD discs. If stored in a dry, cold, and dark environment, it can theoretically last for hundreds of thousands of years. Moreover, since DNA can copy itself, the data stored can exist in redundant duplicates, increasing the overall robustness of the information system it is plugged into.

The environmental conditions that enable DNA data storage on the scale of geological time invite us to foresee quite an eerie picture of glacier vaults where over millennia, information sprouts and grows in large flowerpots - a veritable underground tree of knowledge. Imagine a world where data storage has its own agency: hard drives reproducing by themselves, migrating to colder geographical areas, and running away from sunlight. One day, your social media news feed may publish a story about 10 GB of data that went rogue, asking any witnesses to call local police if they see the data poking around their backyard.